It's a really fantastic visual novel, one of the best I've played in a long time, and the room escape puzzles are all really clever and challenging. The way the story unfolds in the true ending is kind of mind blowing, especially in the way it incorporates the branching choices structure common in visual novels. The game also makes really novel use of the DS touch screen for both narrative and gameplay reasons, which I always appreciate.

To get all of the game's endings, you have to play through it multiple times, and you can't get the 'true' ending the first time around. Thankfully, starting a new game on an existing save file lets you skip all the dialogue you've already read, which helps immensely. Unfortunately, it doesn't let you skip the 'escape' sections, which results in you having to mindlessly repeat puzzles you already know the solution to. Also the way to get to the 'true' ending is somewhat obscure and counterintuitive, I had to look it up.

But apart from those issues, it plays great and the story is extremely memorable with some great characters. Used copies are pretty cheap, so I'd recommend anyone with a DS and an interest in great visual novels / adventure games to pick it up.

I feel like we need some appreciation for packaging that the Japanese version came in:

The box opens 'backwards', with the CD case's spine on the back of the box. Also it's hard to see from this picture, but through the CD spindle's centre hole, you can see a tiny version of Vibri printed on the game's manual.

Currently I just own a 3DS XL and my iPhone / iPad for portable gaming. At various points I've owned a Game Boy Advance, original DS, and original PSP, but I never really had the money to buy many game for any of those systems. My 3DS game collection is currently sitting at around 30 (retail) games, making it larger than my combined collections for all three of those older systems.

I originally bought the 3DS while I was doing an internship that saw me travelling like 3-4 hours a day, so I'd have something to do during that ridiculous commute, but nowadays it's somehow become my primary console. Something about handheld gaming is just super appealing to me.

I don't know, why do people buy new iterations of GTA, Need for Speed, or Call of Duty?

At the end of the day, a lot of people really enjoy the formula of the Pokémon games. Mechanically they're pretty solid and surprisingly deep if you're looking for that. On top of that the world of the Pokémon games is a really enjoyable one, in later games they've done a fantastic job of wold building. Some people just enjoy collecting cute little animals that beat the shit out of each other, there's like 700 now and the balance between them tends to change pretty significantly between games.

Game Freak have done a really good job at iterating on the core gameplay of the Pokémon games in such a way that every one of those three kinds of people will find something new and interesting in each instalment. Each game brings with it new Pokémon and regions that keep the collectors and sightseers happy. On top of that the actual mechanics of battling Pokémon have evolved pretty significantly over time. Gen V introduced new battle formats (triple and rotation battles), seasons which affected the outcome of moves, as well as making TMs (technical machines) significantly more useful by making them no longer single use items. That last one is important as it means you can experiment with new move sets with a much smaller penalty than in previous games.

The changes in Pokémon games tend to be more iterative than revolutionary, but there's still a large demographic that's totally satisfied by that. On top of that, there's always new players coming into the franchise. Game Freak does a masterful job of appealing to both of those demographics and disregarding pretty much everyone else.